Conventional automatic application restarting system techniques are disclosed in, for example, Japanese Patent Publication No. Hei. 6-202861, Japanese Patent Publication No. Hei. 6-266573, etc.
The automatic application restarting system disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication No. Hei 6-202861 comprises a termination discriminating file-producing means, termination discriminating file-erasing means, and restart determining means. According to this structure, before an application is started, the termination discriminating file-producing means produces a termination discriminating file which includes a command name for starting the application. The termination discriminating file is stored in a secondary memory device. If the application has terminated normally, the termination discriminating file-erasing means receives a normal termination code from the CPU and erases the termination discriminating file stored in the secondary memory device. If the application has terminated abnormally, the termination discriminating file is left as is.
Meanwhile, the restart determining means examines the presence or absence of the termination discriminating file in the secondary memory device when the application has terminated, and, when the termination discriminating file is present, the restart determining means restarts the application. Therefore, when abnormal termination of the application has occurred, the application is automatically restarted by using the starting command stored in the secondary memory device. As such, this saves in the time and labour of that would be otherwise be required to re-input the starting command of the application.
A trouble recovery information managing system which is disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication No. Hei. 6-266573 is configured to automatically restart, at high speed, a computer in which trouble has occurred. In this system, a most recent termination code and an immediately preceding termination code are prepared. During the restarting process, these two codes are read and when it is determined that the kind of trouble in both occurrences is the same and the time and date of recording such troubles are different, restarting of the relevant application is commenced. The content of the immediately preceding termination code is updated by the content of the most recent termination code accordingly.
Each of the above-mentioned conventional automatic application restarting systems are configured to determine whether an application is normally or abnormally terminated. However, actually, the content of this abnormal termination includes one case where the termination permits restarting of the application and another case where the termination does not permit restarting thereof or this restarting is not desirable. In the latter case in particular, automatic restarting per se is useless as a step of restarting processing. Furthermore, in the abnormal termination not permitting restarting of the application, there arises the problem that a restarting process and an abnormal termination process are repeated in the form of a loop. For example, in the case of a printer that receives a printing request, but because the content thereof is unsuitable, the printing operation is not appropriately performed, and the printing request and the printing-operation termination are repeated.